I was recently intrigued to learn that only half of the respondents to a survey said that they used disk encryption. Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows have been increasingly using encryption by default. On the other hand, while most Linux installers I’ve encountered include the option to encrypt, it is not selected by default.
Whether it’s a test bench, beater laptop, NAS, or daily driver, I encrypt for peace of mind. Whatever I end up doing on my machines, I can be pretty confident my data won’t end up in the wrong hands if the drive is stolen or lost and can be erased by simply overwriting the LUKS header. Recovering from an unbootable state or copying files out from an encrypted boot drive only takes a couple more commands compared to an unencrypted setup.
But that’s just me and I’m curious to hear what other reasons to encrypt or not to encrypt are out there.
Android backs up data to the cloud. If the phone breaks or gets stolen, you don’t need to recover data from it - you can just pull it from Google’s servers.
In addition, people tend to not treat their phones as “permanent storage”. The concept of losing or breaking their phone is probably more clear, so they make sure to back it up in some way to the cloud or their desktop.
Also, it’s much more likely for a phone to be stolen than a laptop or desktop.